Books! Books! Books!

When my daughter was born almost two years ago, I wondered if she’d grow up reading books. After all, I do most of my reading online, and increasingly find myself reading short articles rather than whole books. Needless to say, she’s loved books so far, even if she’s shredded a few.

But the bigger surprise for me is that books–specifically e-books–have become such a hot industry. When I briefly worked for a consulting firm after grad school in 1999, my first assignment was to evaluate the e-book market. The readers then consisted of the Rocket ebook and SoftBook Reader. Needless to say, I correctly predicted at the time that the ebook-market wasn’t ready for prime time.

I grew up on books, and I’m excited to see that, a decade after the initial market failures, e-books (like touchscreens) are a mainstream reality. I still worry about who will buy them, especially considering that the marginal cost of distributing a typical e-book is even less than that of distributing a 5-minute song. A quick scan of a popular file-sharing site reveals that the pdf version of bestseller The Lost Symbol takes up less than 3MB.

Still, I’ll take a moment to celebrate the progress of technology. I’ve always known that reading was cool, but now we have the gadgets to prove it!

5 responses so far ↓

I love e-books, they give me the ability to easily take my research PDFs “offline” and into a form that is actually very usable.

When they add a persistent http interface so you can lookup similar data I can see synergies between e-books and projects like mine but that is still a little far off.

My one big worry about e-books and e-media as a whole is lifetime survivability. Paper books going back to the days of Gutenburg (and before – well papyri) can still be read; will archiving digital media fair as well? I hope so!

Archiving is certainly an interesting challenge, as is curation. Still, I suspect that old ways won’t keep up with the accelerated rate of publication. Indeed, it’s a lot harder today to decide what is worth archiving!

And I share your taste in open architectures–indeed, the lack thereof has been a factor in my not having either an iPhone or a Kindle. But clearly a lot of other people are less finicky. 🙂

The question of historical record is an important one and, I believe, is the root of the reason that, at least for the moment, electronic books will not replace printed books. Western world culture moves in cycles and while facilities like e-book readers will gain in poularity for their convenience, I believe we are now entering a swing from transiency back to a need for permanence. Printed books will remain a cornerstone of our need to record history. So, let’s celebrate the development of our higher technology without fear for our more traditional formats – they will exist side by side for many moons yet.